Online report of the Progressive Review. For 53 years, the news while there's still time to do something about it.

August 13, 2017

How to jump start a progressive movement

From the Review's obverstocked archives

Sam Smith, 2010

Define your politics issue by issue, not icon by icon. One reason
progressive politics fares so poorly is because we spend too much time on
individual campaigns and not enough on issues. While the former tend to drive
away the independent, the skeptical and those who don't like a particular a
candidate, the latter can attract all sorts to join with others who may agree
only one issue. Define your politics by issue by issue, not by ideology. It's a lot
easier to get a cross section of people backing a particular issue than it is
for them to buy into your whole philosophy of life. Use the former approach on
the streets and save the latter for the bar. You don't need common ideology if
you have common causes.

Use fewer experts from the Ivy League and more from Iowa.

Remember that most minority voters don't get to even look at a glass
ceiling. But many of them run into locked doors every day. Pay much more
attention to the latter.

Don't dis' those whose votes you need. Convert them with policies that
actually help them. Do a good enough job and they'll forget about abortions and
gay marriage.

The red states are not your enemy; they are an undeveloped market.

Remember that minorities have diversity, too. Just because a black
politician talks about hope and change doesn't mean he's Martin Luther King.
Especially if he's from Chicago.

Support small business. Nobody else does.

Support labor unions. Nobody else does.

Go after credit card usury. Nobody else does and everyone else would
love it

Move economic issues back to the top of the list. Since the 1980s,
liberals have forgotten this basic part of their heritage, which brought us
things like an end to the depression, Social Security, a minimum wage and
Medicare. Besides, economic issues are ones that best cut across geographic,
cultural and ethnic lines.

Sing about it. Just about every successful great movement has moved
along to the sound of its own music.

No more stimulus packages for grad school liberals. One of the things many
people don't like about traditional liberals is how federally oriented they
are. This is due in no small part to an elite class that longs for jobs in
Washington. Let them get these jobs on their own. Stop constantly designing
stimulus packages for them with new federocentric legislation. Rediscover subsidiarity: All national legislation with state and local
impact should meet the standards of what the Catholic Church used to call the
principle of subsidiarity: government power should exercised at the lowest
practical level. There lots of ways to do this in federal legislation. Here are
a few:

- Revenue sharing
- Giving money instead of orders for public education and other programs.
- Decentralizing government agencies like some of the best existing ones such
at the National Park Service and US Attorneys - all highly
decentralized and involved with local governments and communities.
- Not making too many decisions at the federal level.
- Supporting the 9th and 10th amendments that clearly limit the federal
government's role but which traditional liberals routinely ignore.

Change the rules as well as the game. Support ranked choice voting,
public campaign financing, more states, a larger House of Representatives with
mixed proportional and district representation like Germany, state banks, and a
constitutional amendment to end corporations' legal status as
"persons."

Distinguish between good regulation and good jobs for regulators. New
laws often favor the latter which is why we keep adding regulators but can't
bring the Glass-Steagall Act back.

Sleep with the devil and your offspring may be crooks. Stop selling out
so cheaply.

Support a shorter work week. It sure helped progressive populists in the
past.

Don't forget the forgotten. Everyone talks about having a black
president, but hardly anyone does anything about the huge number of young black
and white males to whom we offer two main futures: incarceration or pain if not
death on the battlefield. It is similar with the poor in general. They have not
only been deserted by conservatives and centrists but by liberals as well.

Ditch the war on drugs. A great recession is a wonderful time to get rid
America's most unsuccessful and expensive policy this side of foreign wars. It
will save money, reduce the police state, limit prosecutorial discrimination
against the poor, lower the crime rate and attract a lot of young voters who
didn't even known they were progressives.

Don't be afraid to lead: When your movement is pretty much down to
Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich at the national level, you know there's
plenty of room for you. Most great movements have been led by those most hadn't
even heard of a few years earlier. You could be one of them.

Don't be afraid to follow. One of the most useful techniques in organizing
is to support the work of others. A mass movement is built by groups
alternately leading and following each other. And one of the best ways to get
respect is to give it.

Go local for both your lettuce and your democracy: One of the great failures
of liberalism has been its great disinterest in local power. The closer
government is to the people the more they like it and the more responsive it
tends to be. Besides, if you can't be an effective progressive in the 'hood,
then you'll be a pretty lousy one in Washington.

Turn public schools back to their communities. It worked for some 200
years until we decided to turn them into human drone development and detention
centers where the young are taught to pass tests rather than to learn things.

Try to do the most for the most. If your politics clearly help the most, then
they won't mind so much when you also help smaller groups within our society.
But if you help minorities while ignoring the majority you're in trouble.
Remember, everyone wants to be in show business.

Don't let anal retentives, turf protectors, budget bullies, ambitious
lawyers and CYA bureaucrats kill good ideas. Given the state of contemporary
political culture, it would be unlikely that Social Security, Medicare or a
minimum wage could be passed today. That's not so much a reflection of our
politics as it is of our culture. We have mainly learned how to say no.
Progressives need to reintroduce the concept of yes.

Keep in mind the great 1960s saying: Our goal is not to overthrow the
system but to make it irrelevant.

The history of our country has involved repeated conflict between the
specifics of the soul and institutional abstractions -- between people and
places on the one hand and, on the other, a succession of systems desiring to
exploit, subjugate or supplant them. We need to oppose not only the bad systems
of the moment but unnatural systems in general - all those that revoke, replace
or restrain the natural rights of human beings and the natural assets of their
habitats.

The first rule of staying free is to act free. The number of liberals
and progressives that follow this rule is sadly small. Everyone these days
seems to prefer to talk about balancing rights instead of exercising them. But
the rights outlined in the Constitution weren't bargaining chips; they were
permanent guarantees.

Don’t surrender the Bible to the right. Progressives leave the right's
phony theological arguments largely unchallenged, but even an atheist can point
out that the Ten Commandments doesn't say anything about abortion or gay
marriage but sure as hell is down on adultery, stealing (even on Wall Street),
bearing false witness (even in political ads) and coveting anything that
belongs to your neighbor (even in the name of capitalism). The Bible also
doesn't like usury and strongly suggests that the earth is the lord's and not
the property of multinational corporations. The ultimate irony of right wingers
is that that they are comprised in no small part of despoilers, usurers,
war-mongers, hypocrites, idolaters and groupies of false prophets - all of whom
are frowned upon by the book it pretends to follow. And its opponents, who are
more faithful to the words that the conservatives only quote, are often such
good Christians that they never say a mumblin' word about it all.

One of the best ways to revive democracy is to make sure that every
organization, church, school, or club is run according to its principles.

Use the word 'progressive" and not 'liberal.' There are still a lot
of nice liberals around with whom to make common cause, but the word itself
carries too much baggage. Progressives are activists; liberals are a
demographic. Progressives emphasize economic change; liberals in recent years
have largely ignored it. Progressives convert their opponents; liberals rant
about them. Progressives are grassroots; liberals are federocentric.

Encourage citizens to practice reciprocal liberty. No, we don't all
agree on how things should be done, but we can all understand that we can't
have our liberty unless others do as well. Both right and left spend far too
much time trying to stop others from doing things their way. The trick is how
as many as possible can do things their way as long as it doesn't hurt others.

Value tolerance. It's a word that isn't heard much any more but could
ease a lot of our pain. Tolerance is often a necessary waypoint for people on
the way to accepting new ideas. It's the trial period before full acceptance.

Create an alternative culture - Part of the misery of today's America is
that there are too many people unhappy with the system who live their
misery alone. Part of the beauty of the 1960s was in varied alternative
communities. Put down your Ipod and join with others who agree with you. Educate more and scold less. Issues like climate change are complicated
for many and hard to grasp, especially since our schools have devoted more time
to teaching driving and creating drug free zones than they have to science.
Help people understand issues and don't blame them for not.

Make change from the bottom up - Part of the illusion of mass media is
that change can be organized like a TV series. Try it and typically one of two
things happen: it fails or it becomes just more political mush. Too many web-based
liberal organizations are simply more lobbying groups. They don't change
politics, souls, or history. Despite TV and the Internet, change still comes
from the bottom. Build from up there.

Be tough on leaders, not on followers. Those with tightly defined ideas
about how we should behave often make little distinction between people who
merely accept the values of their culture and those who market and manipulate
them. It helps to remember that we are all creatures of our cultures and often
speak in their voice. This may not be an admirable characteristic but it
certainly is a human one. After all, if it weren't for Rush Limbaugh, dittoheads would
have nothing to ditto.

Forget the capitalist-socialist conflict obsession. Two questions help
understand the futility:

- Do capitalists ever ride the public subway?
- Who will run the restaurants in the Marxist utopia?

Mix and match based on the reality of the situation and not on somebody's
theory. And learn about co-ops, credit unions and community banks.

Define America. If you don't like the way the right does it, come up
with your own description, stories and role models.

Speak United States. Most Americans don't talk about stimuli,
transparency or infrastructure. But you'd never know it listening to typical
Democratic politicians. Avoid the language of the corporate executive, pompous
academic, hustling preacher, or boring lawyer.

Have fun. If you don't enjoy your cause, how can you expect others to?

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Speak Progressive. Read TR's speech at Osawotomie.It was about getting money out of politics. And the Progressives did it. It took Nixon's court to turn that around from which the nation is not going to recover ever. The antonym of progressive is confederate, that's why TR went to Osawatomie to address Lincoln's Armyin the midst of the lost cause ascendancy later entrenched by Wilson. Read DuBois, the whole official history was a fabrication. Read Sumner, the nation was not merely progressive but radical, destined to bring about Kantian world peace. The pretense of the lost cause was that the South won the civil war by 1925 when these monuments were raised. There not to remember slavery but to celebrate neoslavery Jim Crow as a national socialist program. The essential right of the slaveholder was to kill his slave at any time for any reason or no reason. Under Jim Crow the criminal justice system took control over life and labor. Any white community or officer acting in its behalf could attack a black community or individual, lynching as a community ritual observance of the fundamental confederate value that all people are born unequal, some lacking inalienable rights-VP Stephens.

SAY IT AGAIN, SAM

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The Review is edited by Sam Smith, who covered Washington under nine presidents, has edited the Progressive Review and its predecessors since 1964, wrote four books, been published in five anthologies, helped to start six organizations (including the DC Humanities Council, the national Green Party and the DC Statehood Party), was a plaintiff in three successful class action suits, served as a Coast Guard officer, and played in jazz bands for four decades.

ABOUT THE REVIEW

Regularly ahead of the curve, the Review has opposed federal drug policy for over 40 years, was a lonely media voice against the massive freeways planned for Washington, was an early advocate of bikeways and light rail, and helped spur the creation of the DC Statehood Party and the national Green Party,

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